By Scott Wright

Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney accused GOP's opponents of politicizing the war in Iraq for political gain. During an after-dinner speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 16, Cheney said, “ … the suggestion that's been made by some U.S. senators that the president of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on pre-war intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.”

Cheney lambasted the Democrats, shaming them with the admonition that even in Washington, “you can ordinarily rely on some basic measure of truthfulness and good faith in the conduct of political debate.”

First of all, as a Democrat I'm thrilled about the veep's sudden appearance and verbal veracity, because if the administration's perception of its own precipitousness is so dire that Cheney himself feels compelled to emerge from his Secret Bunker (in an Undisclosed Location to be Named Later) and spout forth, the spiel must really be hitting the fan in the Oval Office.

Besides, it's totally hilarious to hear charges of political chicanery coming from Big Dick. He was the vice-presidential candidate in 2000 and party to Karl Rove's despicable campaign tactics during the Republican primaries, when George W. Bush's opponent, Sen. John McCain, was accused of being mentally unstable because of his six years in a POW camp in Vietnam.

Still, Cheney is mouthing off after a long silence, in spite of a years-long slog in Iraq that has only gotten worse for a while now.

Could it be that the Dubyas and Dicks have discovered that even their blindest followers are finally figuring out what a bill of goods they've been sold? Reckon so. Cheney has seen the same poll numbers as the rest of us. Only 37 percent (AP-Ipsos poll) think the president is honest and trustworthy. Ouch! Time for a new strategy, I suppose. Mark my words, though, that number's only going to climb as long our president has troops Over There and no viable plan for getting them back Over Here.

Specifically, in his speech last Wednesday, Bigus Dickus was referring to charges earlier last week from Senate Democrats that the administration lied about the reasons for invading Iraq. Truth is, we don't know right now if they did or not, but George W. Bush's recent claim that he has proof he didn't lie is a pretty big lie, itself. And I dare the vice president or anyone else to argue with that fact which, specifically, is this: On Nov. 11, in front of an audience of military veterans in Pennsylvania, the president of the United States looked out across his audience and into a bevy of TV cameras pointed directly at him, and told a bald-faced lie to the American people -- not that I'm shocked by that tactic from this president.

In typically terrible English, Bush slurred sloppily to his audience, insisting that his critics “are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.”

BZZZZZZ! Here's your parting gift, George, and thanks for playing “Try Not to Lie This Time.”

The fact is, no such investigation has ever been completed. An inquiry was begun over a year ago, but the completed first half (Phase I) of the probe dealt strictly with the nation's intelligence-gathering capacities and, as it turned out, many shortcomings. The initiation of Phase II of the investigation -- which, supposedly, will try and determine whether or not the neo-cons in Washington manipulated what intelligence was gathered -- went forward only a few weeks ago after Senate Democrats raised hell and demanded that Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, stop stonewalling and obfuscating and actually start investigating. Of course, as soon as Roberts did finally get off his ass and declare a deadline for completing the inquiry, Cheney and his staffers promptly refused to turn over documents crucial to discovering the truth.

As Michael Tomasky wrote last week in the American Prospect, Bush's assertion that there was proof of the absence of political pressure from his office was “a direct, unmediated, Nixonian lie.”

Coincidentally and to my unmitigated joy, the day after Cheney's remarks newly declassified documents from the Nixon administration proved beyond a single doubt that Tricky Dick (that's Nixon, not Cheney) persisted in deceiving the American public a generation ago, even after his secret war in Cambodia became public knowledge. By proxy, these 30-year-old revelations proved that Americans today -- even lowly liberal Democrats -- are not wrong to question the increasingly apparent opacity of the current administration's Iraq policy.

The Nixon documents tell a lot about how a power-hungry, overly-secretive president and his misguided minions ran amok behind the walls at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, all the while demanding strategy in private that they officially denied. “Publicly, we say one thing,” Nixon told his aides. “Actually, we do another.”

Will someone please cue the “Twilight Zone” theme?

Back in May 1970, the papers make clear, Nixon's military generals were concerned that their civilian bosses were fighting the war, er … inefficiently, let's say. According to an story about the documents last week, “Nixon told his aides to plan offensive operations in neutral Laos, continue air operations in Cambodia and work on a summer offensive in South Vietnam.” As a result, military officials “expressed worry about how the war was going.”

The story said knowledge of the covert operations “had sparked protests and congressional action against what many lawmakers from both parties considered an illegal war.” Still, the story said, Nixon felt that he was able to convince the American public that the Cambodian operation was “all but over.” Of course, we all know the lies and misinformation continued for five more years, and caused a lot more needless deaths along the way. It doesn't take Rod Serling to grasp the similarities with today.

In case you still aren't getting this directly between the goal posts, let me try and boot it through for you. A multitude of similar scenarios have played out recently, all of which involve the appearance of some sort of deception by the current administration regarding the war in Iraq. It's eerie, really.

Here's one example. Remember last year, when military leaders questioned the plan by defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to send only 120,000 troops to Iraq? Remember how Gen. Eric Shensiki, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to Congress months before that a minimum of 200,000 troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq? Remember how the general was fired a short time later? Well, the end of Gen. Shensiki's career is just another example of an undeniable truth about this administration that has been proven time and again, which is that there's little place in it for the truth.
In his American Prospect article, Tomasky wondered what inherent character flaw led George W. Bush to say what he said in Pennsylvania: “What kind of pathetic man would utter such a lie on Veterans' Day, when over 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died" in Iraq?

Bush is the worst kind of pathetic man, Mr. Tomasky, and that's obviously the problem. Dubya's the president of the United States and the commander in chief of the military. But for this lard-brained lair, Veterans' Day 2005 was just another day at the office. Lies, lies, and more lies. Hell, the Bush administration has lied to the American people more times than even Pythagoras can count.

Bush and Cheney and their stooges have looked us right in the eye, over and over again, and flat-out lied a hundred times, a thousand times. They lied about Cheney's meetings with energy company executives, about Duyba's military service and John Kerry's military service; they lied about the progress of post-hurricane recovery operations along the Gulf Coast, and about terror alerts. They lied to us about the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, about his connection to the 9/11 terrorists, about how many troops we'd need to win in Iraq, and about how the Iraqi people would greet our troops “as liberators.” They lied how much the war would cost and who would pay for it and how many allies would join us in the fight. They lied about the cost of the Medicare drug benefit and about their “plan” to “fix” Social Security.

I'm running out of room, but you get the idea.

Finally, as of last week, legislators in the president's own party have begun to turn on him, demanding answers and drawing guidelines for bringing about an end to the quagmire that is the Iraq war. “You don't yet have a plan,” 79 Republican and Democratic senators told Bush last week. “Get one, pronto, and show it to us.”

These bipartisan efforts at congressional oversight are not “baseless attacks,” as the Bush administration claims, nor do they show a lack of patriotism, as neo-con shills like Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and Sean Hannity of Faux News Channel shout at every opportunity. Every one of those 79 senators remembers what happened to this country because of Nixon and his strategy and duplicity in the 1970's regarding Vietnam, and I daresay they're looking to avoid a repeat of history by the worst president we've had since then.

One real shame for many of us in Cherokee County is that Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions remembers Vietnam, too. Still, he refuses time and again to do anything other than blindly follow this president and the administration's senseless policies. If Sessions has disagreed once with Dubya since the day he stole the 2000 election, I never heard about it. If anyone has a news clipping with proof of such a stance by Sessions that they'd like to send me, I'll be glad to set the record straight.

In his column, Tomasky quoted a decades-old speech from Sen. Robert A. Taft, which I feel compelled to include here. Please bear with me, we're almost home.
The Ohio Republican, whom Tomasky said is still referred to as “a hero to today's conservatives” spoke in Chicago on Dec. 19, 1941. Taft said, in part: “As a matter of general principle, I believe there can be no doubt that criticism in time of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of democratic government … too many people desire to suppress criticism because they think it will give some comfort to the enemy … if that comfort makes the enemy feel better for a few moments, they are welcomed to it … because the maintenance of the right of criticism … will do the country maintaining it a great deal more good than it will do the enemy, and prevent mistakes which might otherwise occur.”

Recap: Less than two weeks after the worst attack in American history, the leader of FDR's opposition said to him, “You don't yet have a plan. Get one pronto, and show it to us.”

So which former statesman's example should we follow today in Iraq. Will it be Taft's openness or Nixon's lies? So far, our strategy seems Nixonian, and many now agree it isn't working. Let's try the other way, shall we? As the old saying goes, we can either learn from history or allow it to repeat itself.

Scott Wright is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and an award-winning member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He is a native of Cherokee County.